Bachelor Alf took the vial, lifting it up to his face. He turned the bottle over and scratched his fingernail against the glass. “How odd. Very much like an apothecary’s vial, but typically we’d see other markings—a company name, date, address. Perhaps this is just a household item, then. A way for someone to practice his etching skills. I do hope they improved a bit from this.” He stood silent a moment as he studied the bottom of the vial. “The glass is quite uneven in places, too. It’s not factory-made, that’s for sure, so it must be quite old. It’s yours to keep if you’d like.” He spread his hands wide. “Fascinating, isn’t it? This is the best job in the world, if I don’t say so myself.”

I forced a half smile, somewhat envious that I couldn’t say the same about my own job. Admittedly, plugging numbers into outdated software on an outdated PC at the family farm didn’t often leave me smiling as big as Bachelor Alf did now. Instead, I spent day after day at a wretched yellow oak desk, the same at which my mother worked for more than three decades. Ten years ago, unemployed with a new home, the job opportunity at the farm had seemed too good to pass up—but I sometimes wondered why I’d stayed so long. Just because I couldn’t teach history at a local school didn’t mean I was out of options; surely something more interesting existed than administrative work at the farm.

But kids. With children someday in the picture, the stability of my job was paramount, as James often liked to remind me. And so I’d stayed put, and I’d grown to tolerate the frustration and uncomfortable musings about whether I’d missed out on something bigger. Maybe even something altogether different.

As I stood in the riverbed with Bachelor Alf, I considered the possibility that long ago, he also used to work an uninteresting desk job. Did he finally decide that life was too short to be miserable forty hours a week? Or maybe he was braver than that and bolder than me, and he’d turned his passion—mudlarking—into a career. I considered asking him, but before I had the chance, another member of the tour called him over to inspect a find.

I took the vial back from him and leaned forward, intending to put it back in its spot, but a sentimental, wistful part of me refused. I felt a strange connection with whomever last held the vial in their hands—an inherent kinship with the person whose fingerprints last impressed on the glass as mine did now. What tincture had they blended within this sky blue bottle? And who did they mean to help, to heal?